The original was in a terrible state, in fact it had been torn into 3 separate pieces and was badly creased and discoloured. Thankfully, there was enough of the picture left for me to be able to reconstruct it fairly accurately and only a couple of the players' faces were badly damaged so I'm confident you'd still be able to recognise everyone. Anyway, Rugby players tend to have wonky noses & puffy eyes so no-one's going to notice if I didn't get it quite right in this case! That was a joke, by the way!
You could never make your fortune with photo restoration. It takes hours of detailed work to bring an image like this back to life and it would be impossible to charge the client accordingly but you get a huge amount of satisfaction from doing it and for that reason alone it's worth doing.
For me, the important thing is that it should retain the period feel of the original. All too often you see restored photos which look far too polished & over-worked. I reckon it's far better to retain a bit of period authenticity.
.....And this is what it looked like before I started work on it!
